The Epic of New York City (67 page)

Walls of snow blocked all the streets west of Seventh Avenue. Traffic halted. Horse-drawn streetcars bogged down, and although first four horses, then six horses, and finally eight horses were hitched to one car, the cars couldn't be budged. Steam trains were immobilized in the suburbs, some plowing to a stop in a deep railroad cut at Spuy-ten Duyvil just north of the city limits. A New York Central locomotive tried to butt through snow packed in the Fourth Avenue tunnel, only to topple off its rails. Some idiot asked Chauncey M. Depew, president of the New York Central, if the line could maintain its train service. Depew snorted, “Trains! Why, we don't even know whether we've got a railroad left!”

Vehicular traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge was halted, and police warned pedestrians not to walk across in the shrieking storm. Now Brooklyn was entirely cut off from Manhattan. After various adventures,
ferryboats gave up trying to reach Manhattan; thus, Staten Island and New Jersey also became inaccessible. A few brave and greedy cabdrivers still slogged through the streets. Some poured whiskey into their horses to keep them from freezing to death, and the price of a cab ride rose to thirty dollars, then forty dollars, and ultimately to more than fifty dollars.

When elevated railroads had first been proposed, their advocates said that bad weather couldn't possible affect their operation. Now, however, all the steam trains on the four lines snorted to a halt, stranding 15,000 passengers high above the streets. On the Sixth Avenue line a backlog of trains stretched from Fourth to Twenty-eighth Street. At first commuters sat and shivered in the unheated wooden coaches. The slamming wind teetered the cars on their rails, frightening passengers into believing that the trains would be dumped onto the streets below. Some panic-stricken people left the coaches and climbed down onto the narrow paths by the side of the track, but this exposed them to the full force of the hurricane.

The fire department tried to send hook-and-ladder companies to the rescue; few could force their way through the snowpacked streets. Men and boys propped ladders against elevated structures and brought victims down to safety at prices ranging from 5 cents to $1. A Negro, whose fee was 25 cents, collected more than $100 in an hour or so. One stalled train couldn't be reached by ladders. Its 30 passengers sat it out for 15 hours; but by lowering a cord to a saloon directly below them, they were able to hoist up buckets of booze, so they survived cheerfully and bibulously. At Third Avenue and Seventy-sixth Street an elevated train chugging through the murk crashed into the rear of a stalled train; 14 passengers were hurt, and the engineer of the moving train later died of head injuries.

The snow still buzzed like angry white bees, and the wind thudded into buildings like a berserk ram. Windows shattered. Glass slashed through the air. Bricks were torn loose from chimneys. Cornices toppled from buildings. So many pedestrians were felled by flying debris that an eyewitness swore the streets looked like snowy battlefields. Men, women, and children were treated at hospitals for gashed cheeks, broken limbs, and frostbitten fingers and toes. Drunks toppled into snowbanks and froze to death. In City Hall Park four girls trying to wade through the snow fainted from exhaustion. They were rescued by a burly cop, who dragged them by their wrists, two at a time, out of the park and into the safety of the Astor House.

Before noon that Monday every hotel room was packed. At the Astor House one bank rented a single room for ten of its clerks. Another bank crammed thirteen employees into a single hotel room; still another, a total of fifteen. Besides sleeping on beds and cots, in closets and bathtubs, men sprawled on billiard tables and floors. State armories were thrown open, and within these shelters men and women, complete strangers to one another, huddled together in sleep. Police stations held open house, and many a respectable citizen snored in a cell for the first time in his life.

Saloons, bars, grogshops, gin mills, and billiard parlors stayed open all night, offering hospitality to anyone lucky enough to make his way to them. Unable to get home, marooned in odd places, with time weighing heavily on their hands, and exhilarated by this white crisis, New Yorkers indulged in a mass binge. Steve Brodie, something of a celebrity because he claimed to have jumped from the Brooklyn Bridge two years before, now owned a bar at 114 Bowery. Over the door he nailed this sign: “A free drink of whiskey to anyone that needs it and has not got the money to pay for it. Come in if you need it. Steve Brodie.”

The wind's eerie wail frightened dogs and birds. A man standing at a window of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, at Fifth Avenue and Twenty-third Street, saw “a veritable rain of sparrows falling dead from the eaves of nearby buildings.” Luckier sparrows flitted through the briefly opened doors of hotels; although it was against the law to feed them, people did. Five hundred warmth-seeking birds dashed themselves to death against the façade of the Old London Building, at Broadway and Waverly Place.

Monday afternoon, about 1:30, Roscoe Conkling decided to leave his Wall Street office since no client had showed up. He planned to head for the New York Club. Conkling later said:

Conkling did not mention that when he arrived at the club's thresh-hold, he crashed full length like a timber felled by a lumberjack. As a result of this harrowing experience, Conkling developed pneumonia and mastoiditis and died the following April.

Monday noon Macy's had dismissed all its employees, but when the salesgirls got to the doors and saw the storm's fury, they were afraid to venture out. Executives then announced that they could spend the night in the store if they wished. Sighing with relief, the girls turned back inside, took off their coats, and made themselves as comfortable as possible. Food was brought in from nearby restaurants, cots were set up in the furniture department, and all settled down for the night.

Into the dingy New York
World,
at 32 Park Row, walked a bearded man with snowshoes strapped to his back. Introducing himself as Richard Farrelly, he told the editors that besides having newpaper experience, he knew a great deal about cold weather because he had spent much time in the frozen north. He proposed that they hire him to cover the storm, and they did. Now a temporary
World
reporter, Farrelly laced on his snowshoes, buttoned his coat across his chest, and butted out into the tempest. He couldn't be seen for very long by editors at windows of the
World
's city room. Farrelly clumped across City Hall Park, checked into the Astor House, and was lucky enough to get a room to himself. Ordering up some whiskey, he sat out the storm in comfort and euphoria. Every now and then he would bundle up, lunge back outdoors, plod over to the
World
office, and dramatically stagger inside, his coat snow-spangled and his breath coming hard. Flicking snowflakes from his beard, he would sit down and write thrilling stories about his adventures in the blighted city. His hoax wasn't discovered until long afterward. Even though he was a charlatan, he was so talented that later he became managing editor of the
World.

Shortly after noon that Monday, J. Pierpont Morgan closed his Wall Street office to head for home. Unlike Conkling, he had kept his cab waiting. He climbed inside, and the driver whipped up the horse; but they were just barely able to inch through mounting snowdrifts, past stalled streetcars and beer wagons and hacks and butchers' trucks, piled with carcasses from slaughterhouses. Morgan and his driver often had to stop at a cross street to wait until an especially
vicious blast of wind died down. They got as far as Fifth Avenue and Thirty-sixth Street; beyond that they couldn't go. Morgan left his cab and struggled on foot toward home. Although this was only a block away, the heavyset Morgan was exhausted when he arrived. He crawled up the front steps and managed to ring the doorbell before collapsing. A servant pushed open the door and dragged him inside.

At 2:45
P.M
. on Monday, March 12, 1888, the wind hit a peak of 84 miles an hour. The temperature was 10 degrees above zero.

New York was isolated from the world except for one transatlantic cable. Fortunately, a cable company had buried the wire connecting its office with the end of the submarine cable. Oliver McKee, Boston correspondent for the New York
World,
got in touch with his office by cabling from Boston to London, with London relaying his message to New York.

Monday night was the wildest the city had experienced. Two-thirds of the electric light poles in Manhattan had been blown down, and in Brooklyn all of them were felled. Streetlamps still burning gas were of no help since the frost had shut off the gas supply. With hardly a soul to be seen on the streets, New York looked like a ghost town. Indoors, however, a Mardi Gras spirit ruled. Champagne parties were held in fashionable hotels, while in the Tenderloin section of town, raw liquor was gulped in great quantities.

General William Tecumseh Sherman had taken refuge in the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Two years earlier Sherman had moved to New York and into a house at 75 West Seventy-first Street. Sixty-eight years old, his grizzled beard close-cropped, and deep lines plowing his forehead, Sherman was one of the town's celebrities. Everyone called him Uncle Billy. The old warrior was something of a man about town, and he attended all opening nights. Now, an unwilling guest in the Fifth Avenue Hotel, Sherman wondered what lay ahead for him that tempestuous night. Understandably, the hotel manager told his assistants to shift other guests from one room to another so that Uncle Billy could occupy a room by himself. Most of the night Sherman sat up to stare out at the blizzard. War is not the only hell.

Tenement dwellers were less fortunate. At 10
P.M
., with the temperature down to 6 degrees above zero, gas jets were turned off, leaving them to grope about in darkness. When they ran out of coal and their stoves went cold, they huddled together for warmth. In Hell's Kitchen a flower-selling giantess, called Big Six, went berserk, attacked a cop, and banged about a total of six policemen before she
could be subdued. As they threw her into a cell, she snarled, “You bastards! Don't you know how to treat a lady?”

Five new plays were scheduled to open on Monday evening, but none did. Only four theaters held their usual shows. Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, the stars of
Faust,
dined leisurely in the Hoffman House, a famous hotel on Broadway between Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth streets. The Hoffman House bar was the most famous in town because of Bouguereau's scandalous painting of a nude nymph surrounded by leering satyrs. Irving and Miss Terry thought that their performance at the Star Theatre had been canceled. Surprisingly, every seat in the playhouse was filled that evening, and at curtaintime a breathless messenger rushed into the Hoffman House to tell the stars that they were expected. The news was overheard by a dozen men dining in the hotel; whereupon they gallantly took turns carrying Miss Terry on their shoulders through a dozen snow-clogged streets to the theater, at Broadway and Thirteenth Street.

Another group of hardy playgoers packed Augustin Daly's theater on Broadway between Twenty-eighth and Twenty-ninth streets to watch Ada Rehan star in
A Midsummer Night's Dream
—an ironic choice on the night of the Great Blizzard. In Niblo's Garden, at Broadway and Prince Street, only five persons appeared, but actor-manager Daniel E. Bandmann presented
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
anyway. Tony Pastor's Music Hall was located at Fourteenth Street and Third Avenue, near Tammany Hall. Exactly four customers arrived and bought twenty-five-cent gallery seats. Pastor invited them to occupy orchestra seats and sent word to Tammany politicians to come and see his show for nothing. Seventy Democrats accepted. At the end of the performance Pastor broke out a case of champagne, put out a spread of sandwiches, and held a midnight party for the customers, Democrats, and theater help.

The circus known as the Greatest Show on Earth was scheduled to launch its 1888 season that Monday night in the renovated Madison Square Garden. The
Evening Post's
critic, Charles Pike Sawyer, tramped through the storm to the Garden. Snowdrifts more than 5 feet high blocked most entrances, but workmen had kept one doorway clear. Sawyer sighed with relief when he found himself inside the huge gaslighted hippodrome. He and other newspapermen crowded around seventy-seven-year-old P. T. Barnum to urge him to cancel the performance since fewer than 200 spectators had appeared. However, in the best the-show-must-go-on tradition the white-haired Barnum lifted
his hand in a grandiose gesture at 8
P.M
., the band crashed a brassy counterpoint to the howl of the wind outside, and the circus began. In another
beau geste
the old impresario sent champagne to the ringside seats occupied by reporters and critics. They drank, grew merry, and finally climbed into the ring to make happy idiots of themselves, while the professional clowns took seats and cheered them on.

About 1
A.M
. on Tuesday, March 13, a fight broke out in the main bar of the Hoffman House. The temperature had sunk to 3 degrees above zero. Some actors had gathered to soak up brandy and companionship and make a stand against the storm. Among those present was the noted Irish comedian Nat C. Goodwin, whose liquid blue eyes, Apollo-like face, and personal magnetism charmed one and all; a famous English leading man, Robert Hilliard, a strapping six-footer; and the renowned tragedian, Maurice Barrymore, of the slender nose and flaring nostrils, eyes burning in his lean face. The handsome and witty Barrymore had just moved to New York and occupied a brown-stone house at Broadway and West Forty-seventh Street. Safe in bed that bitter night were his wife and three children—Lionel, ten; Ethel, nine; and John, six.